Akili Interactive’s game EndeavorRX, formerly Project EVO, may go down in history: it’s the first video game that can legally be marketed and prescribed as medicine in the US.
That’s the landmark decision from the Food and Drug Administration, which is authorising doctors to prescribe the iPhone and iPad game for kids between ages eight and 12 years old with ADHD, after it underwent seven years of clinical trials that studied over 600 children to figure out whether a game could actually make a difference.
According to the company’s studies, the answer is yes: one-third of kids treated “no longer had a measurable attention deficit on at least one measure of objective attention” after playing the obstacle-dodging, target-collecting game for 25 minutes a day, five days a week for four weeks.
